use Perl

• like standards... (Score:3, Funny)

  by hfb (74) on 2002.05.31 23:25 (#9028) Homepage Journal

  the nice thing about 'god' is that there are so many to choose from. :)

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• Sounds like anti-Judaism (Score:2)

  by jdavidb (1361)

  I'm guessing the inspiration for that Koranic passage is the Jewish religious calendar, which, if I understand correctly, adds a leap month named Veadar every few years (something like every 3 years in 22 or so). The Koran was big on saying, "The Jews and/or the Christians say God wants you to ... but actually He said ..." Kind of like Muhammad switching his followers from praying toward Jerusalem to praying toward Mecca, or like treating Friday as a religious holy day instead of Saturday or Sunday.

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • Re:Sounds like anti-Judaism (Score:1)

    by citizenx (9)

    The Jewish calendar's "leap year" repeats Adar (and calls it Ve'Adar, which can be construed to mean "and Adar"). It's a 19 year cycle that gets the Jewish and Gregorian calendars to line up again (I was born on 30 September, which was the day before Yom Kippur that year -- the next time Yom Kippur fell on 1 October was right after my 19th birthday), and it goes something like:
    
    Normal Normal Leap
    Normal Normal Leap
    Normal Leap
    Normal Normal Leap
    Normal Leap Normal Leap
    Normal Normal Normal Leap
    
    Note that I pull
    • Re:Sounds like anti-Judaism (Score:1)

      by jdavidb (1361)

      Cool info. Thanks!

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
• Arabic and HTML (Score:1)

  by vsergu (505)

  How does the browser know to display the characters right-to-left when there's no indication of that, or the language, in the HTML? Am I missing something, or is it just Unicode magic that makes it impossible to write Arabic characters left-to-right or Latin characters right-to-left? What are the LANG and DIR attributes for, then?
  
  IE 5.5 does seem to be aligning the lines as though the were left-to-right text, though. (And the two blockquote are identical -- copy-paste error?)
  • Re:Arabic and HTML (Score:1)

    by vsergu (505)

    I've answered my own question with a little research. Unicode magic is responsible; characters have directionality. The DIR attribute is necessary only when the magic is insufficiently powerful, as in an English sentence containing Arabic words.
    
    And LANG is not used for determining direction, since Turkish is still Turkish whether it's written in Latin or Arabic characters.
    • Re:Arabic and HTML (Score:2)

      by TorgoX (1933)

      You need DIR to let the rendering engine know whether to start laying out paragraphs/tables/cells starting from the right or from the left. It's also needed for resolving the form of some things like ( and ), which are directionality-sensitive but have no inherent direction of their own.